Alan DeNiro

Creative Writing

I.
Surprise, it's a really really lucid day.
The penumbra between flesh distills
like good cellophane & I walk through
my day with my head buried in Aristotle's
Poetics. I forget

stuff's happening: It's spring and squirrels
are getting laid, my hair is growing longer,
my students are living in dorms and getting by
perfectly without poetry.

I put the book in my back pocket (it's a pocket
Aristotle). I want to be clear,
clear as a whistle. If there's a blackout
at a cocktail party I want my shiny scalp
to glow, glow, glow!
With all I don't want to know.

II.
Today I learned that an enjambment is like a good
fuck, signalling a clasping of some sort.
This is useful.
I also learned how rhythms can be spoilt
by clumsy folks fumbling &
elephanteering through carefully
planted rows. Of beans;
let's call a bean a bean and
a weird ear a wild one.
ONE-two, ONE-two, BUCKle me BUCKle me

Unraveled, unreveled, it's tough work
to begin with, being sort of young with a few
quaint things to say,
let alone with all the world's linguists
hovering in a straight line in a ragmatag chorus
of strange yet boring intentions.

There's a pack of camels in my pocket.
Should I
consider the evolution of the envelope sonnet
Galapagos? Easter? Anyone want next?

III.
Actually, for now, it's fine to smoke, to look across
the slope of a college lawn, thinking about groceries
and comic books I want to buy. Everything

else will have to wait its turn;
comprehension, all that jazz.
It might be
un-easy but I'm trying to be
a kind soul even though I teach & teach my students
the soul is a cliche.
Inside this hard glossy birdbath,
blue and upside down, the longing
I carry is surprised by itself and goes on
slipping into move and be moved
Is this surprising?
I stiffle my cigarette like an argument
but it's never that easy.

Madness on benches and school property!
Aristotle stuck to my ass!

Of course, the next few years might be messy
and obscure. But look: it's just like blind man's bluff
on a real bluff
and trust me, the imprecise voice
behind you will let you know if you're cold,
if you're luke warm.
If you're getting somewhere.

Cabbagebrain Christ

Who gerrymandered salvation to the advantage
of people with potatoes for brains? Myself,
I have cabbage in the head, but this cabbage
isn't the vegetable the nuns tilled there. I found
this cabbage and placed it into my skull after,
I don't know, trying to kill myself a couple of times,
which was after I promised God that I would
eat faith faithfully, and that I would hope
for the second coming hopefully. Circles
under my eyes as an altar boy, and a decade
later I'm still pretty fucked up, but no more
than someone who tells me that Jesus Christ
picked them—them—for the constancy
of heaven, like picking teams for dodgeball.

I found the cabbage in my backyard.
The cabbage didn't glow, even in my skull.

Potatoes are easily fried and cut, but cabbage
is only good for a few earthy dishes: soups,
a hardy side dish with liver. Uneventful meals.
Yet after years sniffing incense like glue,
I need a brain that's dirtroofed, and yet
sometimes cabbage when cooked right
has the translucence of yellow driftglass
whose edges have been worn smooth.
Save me when the burning buildings drop
from the sky on my kisser. Until then,
you're a few beers short of a full cooler,
my friend, my sweet potatohead.

Cucumber

i pluck a few cucumbers from my backyard
the cucumbers suffer from catatonia
the usual garden variety surrealism
a cucumber at first glance
might not look like a product of the random application
of sensory information or
a vestige of the collective unconscious

but let me tell you buster brown
the skin of the cucumber
whirlygigs with an electromagnetic field
strong enough for Andean llamas to feel the pulse
the cucumber tills its own kaballic flesh
with words mimicing ant paths
most of which making no sense whatsoever
to smell a cucumber mewl in the middle of the night

is a power ballad pungent enough to make Charlemagne a soda jerk

i pickle cucumbers because of this surrealism
this idleness of idiot savants
the sharp vinegar preserves the rind
souring and puckering the quantum mechanics

discrete jars surrounded by manic electrons of glass

after the curation of the cucumber's properties
the cucumber doesn't really exist
except on a subatomic level and the only recourse
when eating a cucumber in lockstep with a
ham sandwich on marble rye
is to pretend nothing is here

maybe next year i'll try tomatoes

Elegy for a Sofa

Today I'd like to talk to you about this sofa
Plaid cross stitches frayed
A little frumpy
But in the history of the world
There has never been a more
Important place to put the caboose

When the great flood came this direction
The sofa floated all the way to Johnstown and back
Just to keep the houses company
Floating by like whirling dervishes

When the Catholic Church moved to the vernacular
The sofa was the first of the upholsteries
To exclaim the Nicene Creed in its native tongue

When the Berlin Wall fell the sofa
Provided rest for the hammerers
Poised on the brink
East of Checkpoint Charlie

After such an old life
This sofa is worthy of our attention
It even resembles the sofa that my mother
Used to change my diaper on

I remember my hands reaching for the pins
Stuck in the sofa's soft hide
Like prisms
Similar
But not exact
Which makes it depressing to say The sofa

would have made a great president
The sofa was arrested last night for vagrancy
The sofa has made enemies of the revolution
The sofa has made sitting for a long time a fetish
The sofa has weakened the morale of our children
The sofa sat in a prison waiting for a verdict
The sofa was burned to make an example out of loafers
The sofa was burned in a forest clearing far from neighbors so as not to
arouse popular sentiments
The sofa's ashes burned above the sky in cross stitches

Lean back in your hard oak pew
There
The stiff hands of the state press against you
Instead of cushions

Soft ballast of the next state

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